Eat more fish!
Food Smart Dublin is on a mission to encourage us to eat more fish, to promote sustainable seafood consumption. As seafood consumers, we normally opt for salmon, tuna, cod and haddock, ignoring the more sustainable seafood available in the seas surrounding Ireland.
Food Smart Dublin is a project conceived by the Trinity College’s Centre for Environmental Humanities to encourage people to eat more local sustainable seafood by reminding them of their coastal cultural heritage as an Island Nation. In the olden days people naturally ate lower down the food chain and by doing so ate in a more sustainable way than we do now.
Although primarily an academic project, Food Smart Dublin has partnered with Niall Sabongi, chef/owner of Dublin’s Klaw, Klaw Poké and The Seafood Café and owner of fish wholesaler Sustainable Seafood Ireland (SSI). Part of this project will be sourcing historical seafood recipes and then adapting them for modern day use. The recipes will then be made available online for anyone to try. By making available these historical recipes, Food Smart Dublin wants to encourage people to consume more seafood as well as wanting to create a sense of belonging and awareness to the Irish coast and highlight these coastal roots. To assist Food Smart Dublin with their academic research, anyone in Dublin who tries a recipe is asked to complete a short questionnaire about their experience in sourcing, preparing and eating the seafood.
The first recipe is “Potted Crab”. Niall Sabongi and Muireann McColgan cooked the original potted lobster recipe and swapped the lobster for crab and have, apart from that, done very little to change the original recipe. That’s the aim and the challenge for Niall as a brilliant chef – to stay close to the original recipe while adapting it to the modern pallet. The original historical recipe and the adapted “Potted Crab” recipe can be found here together with the questionnaire and further information about Food Smart Dublin. There is also a map of Dublin fishmongers and SSI will give you a 10% discount if you buy the seafood for the recipe from them, discount code available via the above link. My effort at preparing this recipe is in the photo. I used a crab that I had previously bought from SSI and frozen. I was told later that the crab should have been cooked before being frozen – good tip for next time! I should have drained the crab meat more thoroughly before adding the mayonnaise, hence the leakage on the plate. Also, I poured over too much melted butter on the top, you can see yellow chunks of butter mixed in with the crab! However, this did not deter from the amazing taste of the finished Potted Crab. I urge you to try this out. Get cooking and eating more fish!